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Promoting your Research for Maximum Impact: Institutional Repository

Introduction

The New World Encyclopedia defines an Institutional Repository as an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating, in digital form, the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution.

For a university, this includes materials such as journal articles, book chapters, conference reports and digital versions of theses and dissertations.

The real benefit of an institutional repository is that it is accessible by everyone, even members of the public. A repository provides a window to the world of academic research and acts as an excellent method of publicity for your work.

Resources to identify research repositories:

DORAS

DORAS is Dublin City Universities Open Access Institutional Repository, providing free, fully compliant, online access to research publications and theses from DCU.

DORAS appear at the top of the results pages for Google, Google Scholar and many other popular search engines.

Accepted material:

  • Journal Articles, Conference Items, Books, Chapters, Reports, Research Theses, Working Paper Series.
  • Author Accepted Manuscript where available, publisher copy otherwise.

Benefits of utilising DORAS to increase your research impact and visibility

  • Accessibility – make your research easy to find by providing a unique permalink to each work
  • Publicity – the potential to increase the impact of your work
  • Altruism – the desire to contribute to the body of knowledge
  • Funding purposes – perhaps a requirement

Methods of Uploading Materials

  1. Via the research engine (Vidatum) at www.dcu.ie/researchengine
  2. Directly into DORAS (using staff login/credentials) at http://doras.dcu.ie
  3. By emailing items to doras@dcu.ie

Example

DORAS is fully indexed in Google and other search engines, therefore greatly increasing the visibility of your research.